There are many industries in which manufacturers of various products and components are required to design and create such products and components to meet customer specifications. These customer specifications, which are typically provided to the manufacturers as requirements documents in printed format, are then often converted by the manufacturer into digital design specifications, which are used as input data in design programs. These design programs use the input data contained in the digital design specifications to create plans for the physical products and/or components embodying the requirements documents.
Traditionally, the process of converting the requirements documents into digital design specifications was performed manually by a person, or more typically, by a team of people, who would read the requirements document, extract the pertinent information therefrom, and then enter this pertinent information into corresponding fields in the digital design specification. However, this is very often a cumbersome process. The requirements documents can be very lengthy; for cumbersome process. The requirements documents can be very lengthy; for example, for an electrical transformer, the requirements document may comprise one or more documents that can contain hundreds of pages. Moreover, the number of errors involved with the traditional process can be substantial, particularly when several different persons read and convert several different portions of the requirements document. Efforts have been made to reduce the number of errors, such as by providing checklists which may be used to verify that all necessary requirements have been found in the requirements document and entered into the digital design specification.
However, even when checklists are employed, the traditional processes for converting requirements documents into digital design specifications which may be used as input for design programs suffer from many disadvantages. For example, there is no way using traditional processes to verify where in the requirements document a requirement was read and how it was interpreted. Therefore, if a question arises concerning the origin of a piece of information, it may be difficult and time consuming to locate the origin in the hundreds of pages of the requirements document. In addition, using traditional processes, it may be unclear to the reader where in a checklist or in a digital design specification a requirement found in the requirements document should be entered. When customers prepare their requirements documents, they do not always follow a similar format, and they do not always use the exact same terminology in describing their requirements, thereby exacerbating this problem.
Moreover, data from the requirements document may be transcribed several times from the requirements document to one or more checklists and then to the digital design specification, with the consequent possibility that the data may be misinterpreted in the process. Furthermore, there is no way to verify what sections of the requirements document have been read, particularly when several different people are reading different portions thereof. Consequently, sections of the requirements document may be omitted, or they may be read by several persons. In addition, requirements that are not part of the checklists may be missed, as there is no defined process to ensure that they are documented. Further, it is difficult to obtain an overview of which requirements in the requirements document have been captured, and which parts still need to be captured. Moreover, if there are common portions of a requirements document that are used for several sections of the digital design specification, such common portions may disadvantageously re-read numerous times for each new section of the digital design specification, thereby causing unnecessary duplication of effort.
What is desired, therefore, is a system and method for facilitating the creation, based on requirements documents, of design specifications that may be used as input data in design programs, which is streamlined and efficient from a time standpoint, which is accurate and not prone to errors, which allows for the verification of where in the requirements document a requirement was read and how it was interpreted, which facilitates entry of requirements found in the requirements document into the design specifications, which reduces the likelihood of duplication of effort, and which facilitates the determination of what sections of the requirements documents have been read and what sections still need to be read.